The Problem

For our project, we wanted to explore the field of environmental trends. All of our group members are concerned about environmental trends that we are seeing, especially because climate change seems to already have reached such an advanced stage while people in authority mostly continue to remain unbothered by it. We wanted to use data to learn more about it while also educating others about what exactly is happening with our planet’s environment. By answering some of the questions we were curious about, we hope to contribute to the solution to this extremely urgent problem. One particular issue we were all concerned about is the effects of climate change, and what factors may be contributing to it.

Summary Information

The dataset we are using contains information on pollution in the United States from the years 2000-2016. The data comes from kaggle.com, and was sourced from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) database. There are 29 columns and 1746661 rows in the data. The data contains lots of information about the locations in which the readings were taken, and includes things like Address, State, County, City, Date Local. There are 144 different cities in the US accounted for in this dataset. It focuses on 4 main types of greenhouse gasses: NO2, O3, SO2, CO.

Table

Here, we have a table of our data aggregated by State and sorted from highest total emmissions to lowest. Each state contains the amount of each major pollutant we are looking at total for the years 2000-2016, as well as all of the pollutatnts totaled (in parts per billion notation). We included this so we could see a breakdown of exactly which states in the US are the biggest culprits for high emmissions, and to also see which pollutants were higher in which states. From the chart, we can see that California has the highest total emissions for all pollutants in the US, clocking in at 281,350,906.5 PPB total. Contrary to that, we can see that Washington actually has the lowest total emmissions, at 227,664.4 PPB total. This is suprising because we expected Rhode Island to be the lowest since it is the state with the smallest amount of landmass.

State Total CO Total NO2 Total O3 Total SO2 Total Emissions
California 257814656.3 7865429.298 15010161.59 660659.3046 281350906.5
Pennsylvania 45634776.2 2345420.728 4991558.88 763426.2926 53735182.2
Arizona 34264618.3 1331707.386 1745251.10 95276.6298 37436853.4
Texas 30550333.3 1428275.707 3174726.60 121694.0795 35275029.7
New York 25155085.4 1303179.357 1666327.14 328574.0492 28453165.9
Illinois 19683526.8 780215.601 1135580.30 134464.3035 21733787.0
District Of Columbia 20304207.9 454545.961 621438.49 108171.6703 21488364.0
Colorado 15592236.0 690890.851 828725.84 53050.6309 17164903.3
Arkansas 14923978.5 344617.781 924590.42 48874.8309 16242061.5
Virginia 13588486.0 383634.404 1016211.99 108598.3735 15096930.8
North Carolina 13173258.3 391794.154 1083913.21 54311.4807 14703277.1
Kansas 12864733.6 349087.388 818543.83 74552.4454 14106917.2
New Jersey 10758292.5 497105.286 629899.93 83271.7037 11968569.4
Florida 11021759.0 190844.246 694577.25 12842.1076 11920022.6
Louisiana 9844380.3 328455.509 557526.08 55993.9654 10786355.9
Missouri 9237361.1 295899.321 549559.64 68182.3503 10151002.4
Connecticut 7509172.3 269126.554 865663.88 27302.5108 8671265.3
Country Of Mexico 8113396.7 193274.380 208345.08 18496.5374 8533512.7
Hawaii 7450970.7 64167.391 510118.64 19991.1314 8045247.9
Massachusetts 6869335.0 402244.854 445837.12 55255.2821 7772672.2
Maryland 6622624.8 234814.183 625770.04 39119.3248 7522328.4
Ohio 6204428.0 277818.274 566229.62 62998.5193 7111474.4
Iowa 5612422.0 175456.824 720312.31 10532.6501 6518723.8
Oklahoma 4831601.6 232787.256 1079825.27 24826.2629 6169040.4
Maine 5337022.2 121346.273 591496.96 22113.7629 6071979.2
Indiana 4972850.7 168775.835 409680.18 43147.2058 5594453.9
Oregon 3602550.4 113819.164 227165.95 11544.0001 3955079.5
New Hampshire 3199517.9 68750.579 259749.17 13162.9908 3541180.6
Utah 3068566.8 114282.777 278013.66 3484.7304 3464348.0
Michigan 2851245.6 137541.550 223690.59 25447.8636 3237925.6
Kentucky 2415766.4 176076.955 427193.59 55160.4319 3074197.4
Tennessee 2560581.4 9912.537 220809.37 4799.5215 2796102.8
Georgia 2482629.2 86692.852 159017.46 3743.8824 2732083.4
Nevada 2145275.6 116807.507 310719.99 3311.1143 2576114.2
North Dakota 1856140.0 52819.691 285302.08 2429.5093 2196691.3
Wyoming 1409450.1 42966.190 496690.82 4442.9952 1953550.1
New Mexico 1504331.8 88016.600 226011.91 4369.0725 1822729.4
South Dakota 1513346.0 42195.171 249788.89 3958.3158 1809288.3
Rhode Island 1417006.0 45195.114 190204.46 3272.7729 1655678.3
Delaware 949607.9 42052.726 96174.69 3681.6973 1091517.0
South Carolina 814410.0 12675.981 207032.96 5395.4103 1039514.4
Minnesota 871140.3 24263.509 96102.91 2415.8389 993922.5
Alaska 835866.1 22332.161 25265.29 12009.3322 895472.9
Alabama 664608.6 29417.825 76935.61 3233.0231 774195.0
Wisconsin 531247.3 22692.597 34007.18 3964.1579 591911.2
Idaho 325654.3 16320.730 49389.00 596.6795 391960.7
Washington 196995.4 9817.304 20111.26 740.4538 227664.4

Charts

Chart 1

The line chart below shows the average yearly emissions levels of each of the four air pollutants in the dataset: Carbon Monoxide (CO), Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), Ozone (O3), and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2). The data shown in this chart summarizes the emission levels of these harmful gases from the years 2000-2016 and is intended to show the gases’ emission levels relative to each other. More importantly, this chart shows the changes in the average emission levels of each gas through the years.

As can be seen in the chart, the average CO emissions have consistently been the highest by a couple hundred parts per billion throughout the years. The average O3, NO2, and SO2 emission levels have been quite close to each other all throughout and saw very slight changes. On the other hand, the line representing the CO emissions has clearly been experiencing a downward trend since the year 2000, which is great news for the environment. However, a slight rise can also be observed towards the end of the CO emission graph, which could be an indicator of a shift into an upward trend in the following years.

Chart 2

Chart 2 is a pie chart intended to show the relationship between the averages of four major pollutants: Carbon Monoxide (CO), Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), Ozone (O3), and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) in part per billion.

When observing the chart below, three observations come into view. The first is that Carbon Monoxide has the largest mean. By knowing which major pollutant has the highest average out of 1.75 million observations, researchers can focus on what sources and reasons are causing such a high number. A second observation is that averages give researchers an easier time comparing how the pollutants stack up with each other. By doing this, these pollutants can possibly be prioritized based on their rank.

Chart 3

Chart 3 is a mapping of all the total emissions from 2000 to 2016. It is actually the same data used for our table above, but mapped onto a chloropleth map to show each state’s differences comparatively. This map makes it clearly visual that California’s total emissions outpace nearly every other state by a huge factor. What’s interesting is that there are a few states that don’t show up on the map, Montana, Mississippi, Nebraska and West Virginia. Looking at the table we made earlier, there is no entries for these states either.